Abstract
Abstract In contrast to West Germany, illicit drugs were virtually absent in East Germany until 1990. However, after the collapse of the former GDR, East Germany was expected to encounter a sharp increase in substance abuse. By analyzing individual data, we find that East Germany largely caught up with West Germany’s ever-growing prevalence of cannabis use within a single decade. We decompose the west-east difference in prevalence rates into an explained and an unexplained part using a modified Blinder-Oaxaca procedure. This decomposition suggests that the observed convergence is only weakly related to socioeconomic characteristics and therefore remains mainly unexplained. That is, West and East Germans seem to have become more alike per se. We conclude that both parts of the country have converged in terms of the culture of cannabis consumption.
Highlights
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the former GDR was subsequently integrated into the West German Federal Republic in 1990, East Germany was expected to experience a sharp increase in the prevalence of illicit drugs (Reißig, 1991) that would result in the convergence of drug consumption patterns in East and West Germany
Given that disappointment related to the individual labor market performance is, closely related to the consumption of illicit drugs, the convergence of this prevalence may be explained to some extent by the sharp increase in unemployment in East Germany during the early 1990s
We present decomposition results that are based on the preferred specification18, for which estimation results are reported in the previous section; see Table 5
Summary
In the former East German GDR the consumption of illicit drugs, such as cannabis, widespread in western societies was virtually absent (Reißig, 1991). This can be explained by the isolation of the country from its neighbors and an extremely high level of surveillance by security forces within the country. when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the former GDR was subsequently integrated into the West German Federal Republic in 1990, East Germany was expected to experience a sharp increase in the prevalence of illicit drugs (Reißig, 1991) that would result in the convergence of drug consumption patterns in East and West Germany. We decompose the west-east difference in the prevalence of cannabis use into one part that is explained by socioeconomic factors and another part that remains unexplained and, represents cultural differences in drug consumption. We employ a modification to the – commonly used – decomposition technique that was originally introduced by Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) This approach is similar to the one of Burda and Schmidt (1997), who decompose wages in order to determine whether socioeconomic characteristics or unobserved human capital endowments shape the west-east wage differential and the process of wage convergence in reunified Germany
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